Many think that it would be wrong to defend an individual from attack if he competently and explicitly refuses defensive intervention. In this paper, I consider the extent to which the preferences of victims affect the permissibility of defending groups or aggregates. These cases are interesting and difficult because there is no straightforward sense in which a group can univocally consent to or refuse defensive intervention in the same way that an individual can. Among those who have considered this question, (...) the dominant view is that that consent imposes only an extremely weak constraint on defending groups. I argue that this is mistaken and defend a much more robust requirement. Indeed, on the account that I develop there are cases in which the refusal of a single member of a victim is enough to make it impermissible to defend a much larger group. At the heart of my account is the idea that consent functions as an internal component of the broader requirement that defensive harms be proportionate: if a victim validly refuses defensive intervention, the fact that defence will benefit him cannot be used to justify harming innocents as the lesser-evil. An important implication of this view is that what constitutes sufficient consent from the members of a victim group will vary on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

This chapter offers a conceptual analysis of territory, distinguishes it from property accounts, and discusses different versions of property accounts, all derived from Locke’s ‘Second Treatise of Government’. It offers a conceptual analysis of territory and the various rights associated with territory. According to Locke, territorial right is established through the subjection, by free consent, of persons and their land to state authority. This theory is found to rest on a number of flawed assumptions, among them claims to natural rights (...) of property and an obvious link between private property and territorial jurisdiction. Cara Nine draws on Lockean principles to claim that a state is a collective that, like individuals, owns property, namely the territory of the state. After examining the historical antecedents of such ideas, the chapter points away from them and towards accounts of territory based on individual and collective claims of rights. (shrink)

Why does it matter that those who fight wars be authorized by the communities on whose behalf they claim to fight? I argue that lacking authorization generates a moral cost, which counts against a war's proportionality, and that having authorization allows the transfer of reasons from the members of the community to those who fight, which makes the war more likely to be proportionate. If democratic states are better able than non-democratic states and sub-state groups to gain their community's authorization, (...) this means that some wars will be proportionate if fought by democracies, disproportionate if not. (shrink)

What limitations on intervention in support of democratic revolutions does proper regard for the collective right of self-determination impose? Some have held that if intervention in support of democratic revolutions is justified, it must cease once the authoritarian regime has been deposed—that any effort by the intervener to use force to shape the new political order would violate the people’s right of self-determination. This essay argues that proper regard for self-determination is compatible with much more extensive interventions.

"The Moral Standing of States" is the title of an essay Michael Walzer wrote in response to four critics of the theory of nonintervention defended in "Just and Unjust Wars." It states a theme to which he has returned in subsequent work. Beitz offers four sets of comments.

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In a pair of recent papers, Allen Buchanan has outlined an ambitious account of the ethics of revolution and its implications for military intervention. Buchanan’s account is bold and yet sophisticated. It is bold in that it advances a number of theses that will no doubt strike the reader as highly controversial; it is sophisticated in that it rests on a nuanced account of how revolutions unfold and the constraints that political self-determination places on intervention. He argues that, despite the (...) importance of political self-determination, humanitarian intervention may be permissible without the consent of the rebelling population. Indeed, given certain structural features of revolutions, there are often reasons to disregard the consent of the population oppressed and intervene before the revolution starts. More controversially, he argues that military force may be employed to nullify the democratic constitutional choice of the newly liberated population and impose a particular form of democratic government, if this is necessary to guarantee the conditions for the future exercise of self-determination. In this paper, I further elaborate Buchanan’s account of political self-determination and argue that once correctly understood, it places tighter constraints on intervention than Buchanan allows. Thus, his bold conclusions should be resisted. (shrink)

In their introduction, the editors ask: Is the frequent practice of humanitarian intervention in the 1990s the beginning of a long-term trend or a historical aberration? Perhaps these essays were written too close to 9/11 to have the perspective needed to answer this question.

As global governance institutions proliferate and become more powerful, their legitimacy is subject to ever sharper scrutiny. Yet what legitimacy means in this context and how it is to be ascertained are often unclear. In a previous paper in this journal, we offered a general account of the legitimacy of such institutions and a set of standards for determining when they are legitimate. In this paper we focus on the legitimacy of the UN Security Council as an institution for making (...) decisions concerning the use of military force across state borders. The context for this topic has changed over the last decade as a result of the ongoing development of the responsibility to protect (RtoP) doctrine and extensive discussions about it in the United Nations. Yet the mostly widely accepted proposals for RtoP still require Security Council authorization for forceful intervention, and strictly limit the conditions under which such intervention may take place. (shrink)

Rights are commonly linked to responsibilities. One commonly hears remarks about the rights and responsibilities of teachers, parents, students, etc. This linking together of the two is the topic of this paper. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first section I distinguish three accounts of the relation between rights and esponsibilities any of which we could have in mind when linking the two together, and I single out the third account for further study. Unlike the other two, (...) it seems to offer fresh material for the theory of rights. In the second section I develop this material. I explicate the general relation between rights and responsibilities as this third account represents it, and I specify the grounds for attributing such a relation to them. My aim here is to elucidate a conception of rights that certain legal and political rights can be taken to exemplify and that has been ignored or obscured in recent work in the theory of rights. In the last two sections I turn my attention to human rights. I argue in Section III that Locke's theory of natural rights can be interpreted as upholding the conception of rights elucidated in the preceding section, and I consider and criticize in Section IV an account of the relation between certain human rights and responsibilities that comes from Joel Feinberg's distinction between mandatory and discretionary rights. The arguments of these two sections are meant to strengthen the case for making room in the theory of rights for the conception elucidated in Section II. (shrink)

McMahan challenges the assumption that respect for self-determination requires an almost exceptionless doctrine of nonintervention by first defining the notions of "intervention" and "self-determination," and then analyzing Walzer's doctrine of nonintervention.